Wicked Marriage of the Sidhe

Chapter One

Sometimes on a night like this one, when the mist comes in from the sea and the wind blows against our castle walls, moaning like a lost child, I remember the night I first met my Faery lord.

It was the night my life changed forever, though I had no way of knowing it then.

There was a feeling in the air on that long ago night, like a storm was brewing and about to begin.

Something marvelous and dangerous was on its way to change my life forever.

Something that had already been put in motion a long time ago.

It was on such a night as this I’d first met Fionn the Fearless, who would later become known as the high king of the Aos Sídhe.

They were believed to be the ancient, magical descendants of the Tuatha dé Danann, long after humans crowded them out, and they’d used their collective magic to retreat to a parallel realm they called Otherworld.

The Sidhe were magical, savage, beautiful creatures. They were never particularly bad, but if you lived among them, it soon became clear that neither were they particularly good. Most people simply called them Faeries.

This is the story of that first fateful meeting and all that came after. It’s a love story, but also a story of violence and heartbreak, mistakes and ultimately, redemption. After all this time, you might ask, “Does it matter?”

And my answer is, yes, dear reader...it matters very much to me.

****

Braden Wanderer

I’ve been told my name is unusual. But then, long-ago, when I was in the mortal world, people used descriptive secondary names, called by-names, to tell each other apart.

These names weren’t hereditary, family names, as they are now.

People were named for their fathers, or for the jobs they did, or, in my case, where they lived...

or didn’t live as the case may be. I was a trader, a mercer, a dealer in wool and cloth, so I was rarely in one place for long. I was called Wanderer.

On this desperately cold night when my story begins, I was sitting by the fire, half asleep, dozy and dreaming, waking up to stare into the flames.

It was in late January, in the old city of Jorvik, later to become known as York.

I was waiting for my uncle Leofric to return home.

He had been terribly late coming back from his guild meeting—unusually so, even though I told myself I was probably worrying for nothing.

Leofric had more than likely gone to the tavern on the corner nearest the Guild Hall after the meeting and had a few pints of ale to fortify him for the long walk home.

It wouldn’t have taken all that much convincing for his friends to get him to decide to stay the night rather than try to walk home in the wind and snow.

Especially considering the lateness of the hour and the sudden, vicious turn the weather had taken.

Yet Leofric was also tight of pocket, pinching every penny that he could.

I wasn’t yet overly concerned. Leofric wasn’t the most pleasant of men—not by a lot.

He had a short, nasty temper, and he shouted too much.

That made him prone to getting into fights in taverns.

But he’d been kind enough to me in his way, and he was my kin, so I’d have hated for anything bad to happen to him.

This far north in the sovereign realm of Northumbria, the weather was unpredictable at best. Outside, snowflakes were swarming through the air like fat, white moths, and the wind was huffing and puffing and threatening to blow the house down.

It wouldn’t have been the first time Leofric had stayed away all night, though he was always complaining about the winter cold stiffening his joints and threatening to turn his blood to slush in his veins.

Yet knowing all of that didn’t take away the uneasiness I was feeling. I’d had these feelings a few times before in my life, and usually it was when something bad was about to happen. My grandmother used to say it was because of my Fae ancestry and my unique bloodline.

A particularly hard blast of wind hit the front door, and despite the warmth of the fire, a distinct chill ran down my spine.

I drew my furs around my shoulders more closely and pulled my woolen nightcap down over my ears.

It was damned cold, unusually so, and the fire blazing on the hearth was having a hard time keeping the chill at bay.

I checked the candle clock once again and saw that the hour was terribly late, long past time when Leofric should have been home and tucked up safely in his warm bed, if he was coming.

The “clock” was unreliable—simply a homemade taper marked by lines cut into the wax with a knife, and as the wax melted, it gave an approximation of how much time had passed.

It wasn’t the best indicator of passing time by far.

Still, it was marginally better than nothing.

But where was Leofric? I should go to bed, pull the covers over my head and go to sleep, but something kept nagging at me, telling me I should go out and look for him.

In another hour, I promised myself, if he still hadn’t made it home, I’d have to go searching for him, in case he’d suffered some accident or been set upon by cutpurses.

He might be lying injured along the way somewhere, and he’d freeze to death by morning.

Leofric was my uncle on my mother’s side of the family—she had been his eldest sister—and he had seven living children that somebody would have to take care of if anything happened to him.

Not me—I didn’t have the means. His wife Matilda would have to go to relatives in town and hope she could count on them.

In those days of high child mortality, parents like Leofric and his wife Matilda would often fill their home with children, if they could, as a kind of insurance that at least some of their offspring would survive to adulthood and be able to take care of them in their old age.

The problem was that if or when they all survived, it sometimes caused hardship.

The winds howled at the door and shook the windows again, demanding to be let in.

Glass was expensive and rare in those days, so Leofric used shutters and oiled cloth to cover them, the cloth tightly stretched to make it semi-translucent and let in some light when the shutters were open.

Restlessly, I got up and prowled toward the door to look out, feeling a strange, nervous compulsion to see if Leofric might be coming down the street at last.

It was such a dark night out, however, that even the moon didn’t have the nerve to show itself. The indifferent stars weren’t helping much either, and the usually bustling streets of Jorvik were dark and forsaken because of the unusually miserable weather.

Jorvik, which in subsequent years would become known as York, was an ancient city.

Some said it dated from Roman times, when a strong military fortress had been built on this land.

The southern half of Old Northumbria was under Danish or Viking control and functioned as its own distinct state known as the Kingdom of Jorvik, while the northern half remained under the control of native Saxon lords, functioning as a semi-independent earldom centered at Bamburgh.

Jorvik had been through a lot, though it had always recovered and at that time was becoming an important and wealthy place that prospered massively off the wool trade.

Its commerce was governed by merchant guilds, and it was the trade that brought me there so frequently.

In fact, I was what was known as a “mercer,” or a trader who dealt in raw textiles like wool, though I hoped to one day expand into more luxury items like silks and other, finer fabrics.

I thought for a moment that I heard a slight scratching sound outside the window after I closed the door, but when I obsessively turned back to look out the door again, there was nothing I could see stirring.

The normally bustling street was empty and dark.

It was the terrible weather, I told myself.

A narrow, windswept lane was all I could see, filled with shifting shadows, and I thought for a moment that I saw a dark figure duck inside the nearby alley.

It had only been for a moment, like a flicker of light half-remembered after it faded, but I was spooked by it and quickly closed the door and bolted it.

It’s not the first time lately that I’d seen something out of the corner of my eye or had this same feeling of uneasiness, or of being watched.

Someone had gotten behind me two nights before as I walked back to Leofric’s house late in the evening.

I’d been sure of it at the time, though later I’d dismissed the idea as imagination.

Leofric had assured me that whenever I visited Jorvik on my trading trips, I was welcome to stay with him and sleep downstairs in his shop.

I slept on a straw mattress on the floor, because beds were expensive luxuries in that time.

Personal space was not valued the way it would be later on, and travelers routinely slept in large common rooms in the inns and taverns that had rooms to be rented for a night—sometimes even in the same bed if space was tight alongside strangers.

It was not a custom I enjoyed at all or had ever gotten used to.

To save the extra coin, not to mention the very real possibility of sharing a bed with an unwashed stranger at the tavern, I stayed in Leofric’s home and much preferred my straw pallet at the back of the ground floor shop to the alternative.